For someone responsible for important data, I'm more than a bit surprised that you do not know about this extremely important phenomena. It does indeed exist.

Can checksum's be used to protect our digital archives? If yes, how to get started in such a manner?

If data changes due to dormancy and slow changes in the charge on a disk platter or SSD, a smart storage system will notice that. There's even a checksum link right from your wiki article to get you started. A decent storage controller does a lot more than that. Thing is, all this is expensive compared to the cheap yet dumb external drive, which does have its place in smaller systems, but won't do any of the constant monitoring to keep data fresh.

Bottom line, you have to use the right hardware. It begins on the low end with proper server RAID controllers (LSI, 3Ware, Areca, search about their RAID 6 offerings), and it ends with Enterprise Storage Systems like EMC, which are massively redundant and geographically multi-hosted, and run on hardware only large institutions can afford. Short of Yellowstone's caldera blowing up and covering the Midwest with 12 feet of ashes, we probably won't lose the data I am responsible for, but then we'll have different problems .

rattymouseRegistered: Feb 04, 2006Total Posts: 6204Country: China

That's just it. I have in my case 32,000 images sitting on a hard drive that is 4 years old. I have NO IDEA what condition those images are in. The drive is fully operational and shows no signs of failure. Yet 20 images of mine are known to be corrupt. 20 VERY important images of my son in the hospital after his birth. Who knows how many more images have reached total failure? I dont review all 32,000 images every year.

If the situation is this bad today, what will it be like 10 years from now? 20 years? What about 40 years from now when i'm ready to hand everything down to my kids? Will these images even be viewable?

I lost those 20 images even having a back up plan in place. My back up system overwrote the good data with the bad data. I backed up bad data!!

I need to learn this checksum system since from what you are telling me, this would have caught and prevented this problem.

Every time I bring up data rot to anyone, they treat it as a non issue. It seems that no one cares that digital files are not archival. I am not willing to accept that.

deang001Registered: Apr 23, 2011Total Posts: 1776Country: China

Reagan wrote:
Greetings and Salutations my old cyber friends
Several months with no camera but 2 MF lens still to fondle
I recently purchased a D300 with a Katz eye focus screen and well I washed the grease off my hands and put it to my eye

Black is still my favorite car color all with 50 1.8 The katzeye works great and seems to be in sync with the focus confirm light but only half were were in good focus

Gotta love the "Bow Tie"

Reagan

Very nice, Raegan. Nice to see you dropping in !!

deang001Registered: Apr 23, 2011Total Posts: 1776Country: China

paxnobiscum wrote:
Thanks for all your friendly comments re my humble shots. I find it very hard to remember your real names - do you still keep a list of user-names and first names, Leighton? I would appreciate a copy.

The Nikkor 35/1.4 is one of my favorite lenses. Here is a snapshot portrait of a good friend of mine, a self-made ornithologist living in the village. @f/1.4.

Keep up the good work Leighton... what we want is MORE people buying MORE MF Nikkor lenses...

I wish I had some photos to share but those I took today are still in the camera... but, alas i do have a few downloaded from last week. Here is one shot of my neighbor's roses taken with the 135 f/2.8 Q.C. AI'd. Looks so real you think you might reach out and touch it... mmm, good!

Steve the photo from Yosemite is very very nice. That place is on my bucket list
Mahai so glad to hear that you are up and around. We have missed you.
Petur great work with the 20mm I would love to have one for my D600 and these photos are a great example of what it can do!!!
Georg I love the selective focus in this photo
Reagan so glad to see you with a camera in your hands once again. Great shots!
Very cool photo Jay that car should be restored to it's former glory - for sure!!
Chin you photo certainly never disappoint and this one is right on!